50 THE HUMAN BRAIN. 



views of the solid pieces of the nervous system. These, as we have 

 shown before, are all of them of spiritual machinery; in other words, 

 they have the power of dramatizing mental functions. Even the 

 spinal cord acts as if it were a sensible animal, guiding the fingers, 

 for example, to the seats of pain by its automatic endowments. 

 How much more must the supreme fluid, whose essence is motion 

 and plastic virtue, be capable of dramatizing or representing the 

 powers of the mind and soul, and their ever-varying relations to the 

 microcosm. A fortiori, it will act like wisdom and like will every- 

 where, when its mere channels, wherever they extend, have these 

 quasi-living properties. It is here to be remarked, that we are in 

 the strictest keeping with experience ; that we are simply postulat- 

 ing for the fluid brain the same thing, though in the fluid degree, 

 which physiology claims already for the solid brain. But there is 

 this difference, that the solid brain, or the nerves, are of course li- 

 mited to the nervous system, whereas the fluid brain, or the nerve 

 spirit, does not end with these conduits; but when it is shed from 

 the fingers' ends, heart's ends and viscus' ends of the nerves, it can 

 make use of every other structure as its vehicle, and thus import 

 the drama of life, in all its degrees, into the flesh and entrails of the 

 universal body. Agreeably to a common fact, that where a form 

 ceases, its essence, if of true virtue, still passes on, and applies itself 

 to utilities that it could not execute when confined to its bodily 

 sheath. 



We may perchance be accused of materialism for demanding such 

 a physical wisdom. So an insect possessing only a spinal cord 

 might accuse of materialism a being possessing the sensual brain, 

 because the latter exhibited this as still a nervous system; and a 

 creature terminated by the sensual brain might reproach materialism 

 against a being who carried the nervous firmaments one step higher 

 in the cerebral hemispheres, because those hemispheres were still 

 nervous system. The insect conception of sense (if the phrase can 

 be pardoned) is doubtless null; and could the creature evolve it, the 

 nullity would appear in the want of body and structure, in the im- 

 pression that pure spirit or abstraction comes on at the top of the 

 spinal column. The brain, however, is a spirit pure enough to the 

 spinal column. And so the mind, organic and in ratio with the rest 



